Creating bass weight and impact?

[audiofooled]

Thread title and OP's comment reminded me of this youtube video i watched a couple years ago:

I've seen that video, basically what he says is that the impact is in the subwoofer range exclusively. I cant help but notice that he says his mains are bookshelves, so possibly not able to keep up in the midbass. He gets the "kick", but only in the sub range, which many of us here are describing as "weight". Waveforms of this kind, be it movies or music, are containing wide range of frequencies and are wide enough in bandwidth to give both your mains and the subs a run for their money, also your amps. I think that's where the confusion is coming from.

It's the setup and phase alignment, also SPL capability that would dictate weather you feel mostly weight from subs or the full spectrum of the impact and weight.

 

[Sokel]

I've seen that video, basically what he says is that the impact is in the subwoofer range exclusively. I cant help but notice that he says his mains are bookshelves, so possibly not able to keep up in the midbass. He gets the "kick", but only in the sub range, which many of us here are describing as "weight". Waveforms of this kind, be it movies or music, are containing wide range of frequencies and are wide enough in bandwidth to give both your mains and the subs a run for their money, also your amps. I think that's where the confusion is coming from.

It's the setup and phase alignment, also SPL capability that would dictate weather you feel mostly weight from subs or the full spectrum of the impact and weight.

This video is totally insignificant just by the tested signal,guns shots and explosions.
That's not where a set of drums beats,anyone with an RTA can see that.

 

[audiofooled]

The frequency range doesn't seem out of the ordinary:
View attachment 339094

So it must be about brute force in their operating band then. With enough of these, I guess any frequency can blow you away.

 

[Rja4000]

most live events are tuned by ear

???
Smaart is pretty common in big concerts

 

[audiofooled]

This video is totally insignificant just by the tested signal,guns shots and explosions.
That's not where a set of drums beats,anyone with an RTA can see that.

Yeah, I watched the "John Wick" series. Personally, It doesn't sound realistic to me when ordinary guns are "beefed up" lower in the frequency range. They usually sound like firecrackers, only louder, rather than cannons... Automatic firearms are like bullets to my heart so I lower the volume.

 

[Rja4000]

The "trick" is the SPL.

I will always remember 1983 Werchter festival.

Around 85000 people.
Eurythmics
Simple Minds and U2.
Awesone.

Then, Peter Gabriel came.
The level went up several dBs.
Especially the bass.
They were using synth.
So it was possible to push a clean clear deep bass to a level unheard before.
Ground was (literally) shaking.

 

[audiofooled]

It would we nice if we remind ourselves of this:

Music: how loud is loud? (video)

Here is a much needed video on the topic of how loud we really listen to music. And issues related to hearing damage, etc. It is an argument that seems to come up twice a day since I started testing headphones. Here, I review the literature on true dynamic range of music and considerations...

www.audiosciencereview.com

For one of the tracks I posted earlier, the impact started with right around 16 Vrms at the speaker terminals, and 23,6 Vrms would be really good impact. So SPL is indeed a big factor.

 

[Sokel]

Did a little test to see with the 5th track of The Sheffield Track & Drum Record (Ron Tutt) which a friend here mentioned (can't find the post) .
Not very low content but the friends that said it's about SPL too are right.
It took about 92db average to get to a strong impact and at the end the RTA looked like this (mic is SPL calibrated) .



I then put a strong but easy track with low content (Evanescence -Artifact/The Turn ) which looked like this:




...and nope,no impact.You can fell the strong single beats but that's about it,no chest punch (the content around 80-100Hz peaks are mostly synth,not drums)

The combination of strong mid-bass and SPL must be the answer.

 

[audiofooled]

I found a strong correlation that transients with most impact and weight are basically a quick bass drop sweep I described earlier. At my MLP they sum as something like this:

As similar as this FFT isn't quick enough to draw the sweep from higher to the lower frequencies (I also slowed down the animation), my body also perceives them as happening all at once. Impact is there and weight depends mostly on how low does the sweep go, as well as the amplitude of the lower frequencies. More often than not, lows are many dB higher, but in this case the frequencies 110-40 Hz are mostly reaching the same level, with exception of a dip in the 50's region which is to accentuate the 58 Hz soft sinewave and harmonics that come after the transient.

The attack contains enough energy to resonate chest cavity and basically any hollow object, room included. At the moment of attack, doors are resisting opening, and if they are opened with a small gap, they oscillate back and forth. So there is some real pressure in room.

This is the track and this transient is about 1:37 into it:

For me, the most energy in the shortest amount of time is what's creating this phenomenon. And SPL is usually much higher than we think, very well explained in the thread of "Music: how loud is loud".

 

[poxymoron]

I was at Noel Gallagher in Dublin last summer and the Happy Mondays were one of the supporting acts. Their 5 minute intro was fantastic. I could feel my clothes vibrating on my body and the chest impact was sensational. If I hadn't had half a dozen drinks on me at that stage I'd have been minded to measure the frequency with my phone app, FWTW. Sorry I didn't do it but it felt much lower than it probably was. More SPL I think.

 

[dasdoing]

last week I was in front of this beast

look at all the subwoofers.
you see that small structure in the middle where there is a blue dressed worker?

you can see it here in the picture I took at the closest I got:

that's when I literally remembered this very topic cause I felt the bass in my stomach and made a subjective analysis of the sound.
I must say the lower bass was waaaaay too much. it's funny cause the overall sound wasn't something I would describe as too loud. those modern line arrays do a very good job at directioning SPL.
There were parts where only upper bass above 100Hz-ish were playing and they sounded wounderfull (I think they had dedicated drivers for those), but as soon as the subbass kicked in it would overpower everything.
So my takeaway from this is that chest pounding bass isn't something I would ever want at home, as the overall sound would be waaaaay too loud to make it sound balanced.

Now obviously a stage of this magnitude has a biiiig target area:

and unfortunately you can't steer the subbass like you can with line arrays for the rest of the spectrum. So the powerfull bass makes sense overall. But when you are in the high energy zone it is waaay too much imo